The Family Remains(65)

I asked her if she’d noticed the graffiti in the house on Cheyne Walk that said ‘I AM PHIN’. She said that no, she had not noticed. I said: It is quite a coincidence that this unusual name was on graffiti inside a house you inherited and is also the name of your very, very good friend. She agreed that it was a coincidence. I asked her why she was here at her friend Dido’s house when she had a flat of her own to be in. I asked her if she had been hiding from me. She said: Not at all, I just wanted to let the dog have a run around in Dido’s garden.

It was all lies. Of course it was all lies. So. We will get her into the station tomorrow for some proper questions at a hard table on an uncomfortable chair and see if we can persuade her to stop telling us so many lies.

I make my pasta and I watch a detective show on the TV. I like detective shows, even when they get it all wrong.

At around 9 p.m. I get a message on my phone, from Philip Dunlop-Evers.

Samuel. Sorry to bother you. Are there any updates?

I reply that no, there are no firm updates, but that tomorrow promises much news. We have a possible last-known address, I tell him. We are trying to track down two people who may have lived in the house at the time of Birdie’s death. We have a lot going on. We will speak tomorrow.

Thank you, he replies.

In the shower I think of the case as if it is a spherical thing, a world spinning in three dimensions inside my head. I look for the holes in it and try to find ways to fill the holes or pull something from one side of the sphere to the other side to make sense of the hole. It’s all about completion. This story is so very nearly complete, but the holes are bizarre and infuriating. I think about what I know:

In the late eighties a young woman called Birdie Dunlop-Evers found herself living temporarily in a large house where her band had filmed a pop video.

The large house was owned by Henry and Martina Lamb who had three children: Henry Jr, Lucy and Serenity.

(As an aside, I am confused that parents who would name their first two children in such a traditional fashion would choose such a bohemian name for their lastborn. As if there were other influences at play. The nameless, formless cult they died for, perhaps.)

At some point after moving into the house, Birdie was killed by a blow to the head. She was then mummified in expensive towels and hidden on a rooftop behind a chimney stack for many, many years, before her remains were thrown into the Thames in a timescale that is roughly commensurate with events since Libby Jones took ownership of the house on her twenty-fifth birthday.

At around the same time as Birdie was killed by a blow to the head, Henry and Martina Lamb poisoned themselves on their kitchen floor alongside a mysterious man whose initials were DT. Shortly thereafter (close enough in time for the baby Serenity/Libby to have been recently fed and changed when the police arrived), somewhere between two to six teenagers, depending upon whose account you believed, fled the house and were never to be seen again.

Two of these teenagers were Henry and Lucy Lamb, we can assume. Another might have been PHIN of the graffiti.

I stop soaping myself as I feel a small hole fill itself in.

Phin Thomson.

DT.

Could the mysterious DT have been the father of Phin Thomson?

It seems almost certain to me that this could be the case.

So let us assume that ‘Phin Thomson’ was also resident in the house at the time of Birdie’s death.

And is now in receipt of ￡2.48 million from the sale of the house.

I turn the sphere inside my head a little to see it from another angle. I turn it back to Birdie.

Birdie did not arrive at Cheyne Walk alone. She arrived with a boyfriend. Justin Redding, the percussionist. No trace of him was found. No one remembered seeing him. Was he still there the night that Birdie died? Or had he left before? No one I’ve spoken to seems to think he could have had anything to do with the three so-called suicides or the death of Birdie, his girlfriend. He was too soft, apparently. But to me, right now, he seems a likely culprit. We will need to reel him in from wherever he has been hiding away these past twenty-six years to prove that he is as innocent as those who knew him seem to believe he is. Justin Redding, I realise overwhelmingly, could be the key to everything.

I turn the sphere again to Libby Jones and her red-faced lies, the lies that she does not want to tell, but that she has no choice but to tell.

The dog comes to mind. Her mother’s dog.

Another job for tomorrow. I make a mental note. Because if the dog does not belong to her adoptive mother in Spain (quite apart from Libby’s vivid physical tells when she explained the situation to me, who shares a dog with a mother in Spain? Nobody), then Libby has another person she considers to be a mother. Might this be Marie Caron, the female beneficiary of a third of her inheritance who is now ‘on holiday’ without a phone? And might Marie Caron be another of the indeterminate number of teenagers who disappeared from 16 Cheyne Walk in April 1994?

My head loops round and round the sphere, trying to find another way to complete it, but this feels like enough for now.

Justin.

The dog.

A man called D. Thomson.

I set my alarm for 5 a.m. I have much to do.





48





Marco orders a Coke and drinks it through a straw, his eyes flicking constantly from the street to his phone and back again. Kris Doll is running late. He said he’d meet them here in their hotel lounge at two thirty, and now it is nearly 3 p.m. But finally Marco hears the sound of a motorbike’s thrumming engine and through the window on to the street he sees a man removing a crash helmet and running his hands through ropey dark hair before heading towards the revolving door.